Secretary Chertoff told me I was wrong. He argued that providing probationary status to every illegal who turns in their paperwork would be useful in the effort to find the terrorists hidden in our own country. If I understand him correctly, he believes that the covert terrorists ill be afraid to turn in the paperwork and will thus be left much more exposed as everyone else will have their probationary documents.

I would like to hear from counterintelligence professionals this weekend on this specific point. Please provide me your analysis at hugh@hughhewitt.com. There are counterintelligence professionals throughout the federal, state and local governments, in foreign governments, in academia, and in the think tanks. Some are retired, some are junior and some are senior. I’d really like to hear your answers.

A lot of non-professionals will no doubt send me their opinions as well, but I am interested primarily in the opinions of those who are spending their days trying to prevent another major attack on our soil. Please give me an idea of your background, and if I can use your name and publish your e-mail, please let me know that too. I will not publish any e-mail that doesn’t explicitly give me permission to do so. I will publish the opinions of those who agree with Secretary Chertoff.

And 30 year veteran of the INS Michael Cutler –a frequent Hill witness on the subject of immigration and national security– writes:

In listening to the politicians go at where the illegal immigration crisis is concerned, I am forced to wonder if most of these “leaders” have taken the time to consider the findings and recommendations of the Presidential Commission on the Attacks of September 11, 2001 or the companion report, “The 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel.” Those politicians who favor providing millions of illegal aliens (undocumented workers) in the parlance of Senator Kennedy and others, appear to be ignoring a basic issue that has not been, addressed in all of the discussions about the implementation of a Guest Worker Amnesty Program: How would the adjudicators at USCIS know what name and other identifiers should be imprinted on the “tamper-proof” identity documents that would be issued to many millions of illegals? This may seem to be a strange question, but lets consider the facts. When Kennedy and others refer to these millions of illegal aliens as being “undocumented” a political agenda is in play here, they want to distract us from the fact that these people are aliens and that they are present in the United States in violation of law. That makes them “Illegal Aliens.” Kennedy, in fact, has on occasion simply referred to these law violators as simply, “The Undocumented.” This term is particularly devious because it neatly sidesteps the facts that these aliens are violating our laws. But, for a moment, let us consider what documents they are lacking so that he can blithely refer to them as “The Undocumented.” They lack any form of reliable identification that properly identifies them. Without reliable identity documents, how can the adjudicators know the names, dates of birth or even the nationalities of these millions of illegal aliens? How would they determine when, where or how they entered the United States? These would be important questions under normal circumstances, but under the current situation where our nation is, on a daily basis, focused on averting the next terrorist attack, these questions become absolutely critical!

Put yourself in the position of the adjudicators at USCIS, the agency that has been absolutely excoriated in one oversight report after another that have been issued by the GAO (General Accountability Office) and the OIG (Office of the Inspector General). Fraud permeates the bureaucracy at this agency that adjudicates the full spectrum of applications for immigration benefits including the conferring of resident alien status upon aliens and even the naturalization of aliens in which case they are granted the highest honor and most valued of all immigration benefits; United States citizenship. This is the very same agency that would be tasked with the implementation and administration of any Guest Worker Amnesty Program. These adjudicators are under extreme pressure to crank our completed applications for the various benefits that they adjudicate and the bill that is noted in the article below that appears in today’s Washington Times, has as a provision, the mandate to adjudicate 100,000 applications for the proposed Guest Worker Amnesty Program, each and every day! The best analogy I can imagine is to compare this daunting situation with telling a team of technicians that they need to make certain that the spokes on wheels of the racing bicycles at the famed Tour de France are in good condition. The problem is that they will need to make this determination as the bikes speed by after they have crested a steep hill and are charging down the road at full speed!

Once again we see politicians make artful use of language to create an illusion that the program they are desperate to implement would have real integrity. An example of this is former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Senator John McCain making a point to refer to the fact that the identity documents that would be issued by USCIS to these millions of undocumented aliens whose true identities are unknown and unknowable, would be “Tamper-Proof.” Incredibly they link this to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and claim that this would meet the requirements of the 9/11 Commissions findings and recommendations. All I can say is that I was born on a Wednesday, but not last Wednesday! First of all, there is no such thing as a tamper-proof document any more than a ballistic vest is “Bullet-Proof.” Such protective vests are “bullet-resistant” and even the most sophisticated of identity documents would only be tamper-resistant. The bigger issue, however, is not whether or not the documents that would be issued could not be altered, but rather that there would be no reliable way to know what information to put on those cards in the first place! Simply conducting a “Security Check” on the names that the aliens would write on their applications is nearly worthless. Running a fictitious name through a computer database would yield no benefit for national security inasmuch as terrorists and criminals who were careful enough to avoid having any scrapes with law enforcement authorities in our country would not have their fingerprints in our databases. If they then provided a false name on their applications, they would be given a “clean bill of health” and issued one of these “tamper-proof” identity documents that they could then use as breeder documents to obtain an entire suite of official identity documents in a false name. This would include driver’s licenses, Social Security Cards, library cards, credit cards and bank accounts.

If you think I am wrong, consider that when we make purchases at a department store even if we are using our own credit card, we are often required to show the store clerk a driver’s license to assure that clerk that we are who we claim to be. This is an even more important issue when we pay by personal check. Yet, USCIS would, under the provisions of a Guest Worker Amnesty Program, provide millions of illegal aliens who have violated our nation’s borders and laws from the first day that they set foot on our nation’s soil, with official identity documents that would enable terrorists to embed themselves in communities around our country as they await instructions to launch the next terrorist attack against our nation and the people who live in the United States. You would have thought that the arrest, just last week of 6 foreign-born terrorists who were thwarted from carrying our a bloody attack on a major military base in New Jersey (Fort Dix) would have served as a reminder as to just how tenuous our situation is, but apparently these politicians just cannot bring themselves to do what is in the best interests of our country but rather what is in the best interest of the various special interest groups and deep-pocketed campaign contributors who have an over-riding desire to flood the labor market with cheap, compliant and exploitable labor.

The article makes it clear that the proponents of this insane Guest Worker Amnesty Program want to rush it though the process as fast as possible. I frankly cannot blame them for this. If I was attempting to deceive the American people and those decent politicians who truly want to represent their constituents and all citizens of our nation, the faster I could push this bill through the process the better. Legislation that smells this bad needs to be moved so quickly that no one realizes how bad the stench is until it is too late and it is a done deal. The article ends by quoting John McCain as saying, “We all know this issue can be caught up in extracurricular politics unless we move forward as quickly as possible,” This is how con artists operate, I find it reprehensible that there are members of both houses of Congress and candidates for the highest elected office of the United States would act as mere charlatans! Any politician who could conduct himself in that fashion has made it clear that he is not worthy of our trust and should have his political head handed to him.

I commend Congressman Pence’s leadership evidenced in the statement that is attributed to him in the article:

“The president’s willingness to accept the granting of amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants has sent a harmful message to Republican voters around the country,” said Rep. Mike Pence, Indiana Republican. “But I also believe that’ll sort itself out in the primaries of 2008. At the end of the day, this is an issue where I find myself focusing less on politics than what policy I think is in the best interests of the American people.”

There are many reasons why I oppose this ill-conceived and extremely dangerous bill. First and foremost is the continuing threat of terrorism and the way that terrorists would be benefits by this piece of trash masquerading as legislation. The title of this bill should be the “Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007!”

UPDATE: 8:00 AM 5/26/07:

From “A Jacksonian”

Dear Mr. Hewitt,

As you have asked for some of the problems with letting large numbers of unchecked illegals in from all points on the globe, but even restricted to Central and South America, you may find some of the following of interest from my writings, and note I do back these outlooks up from the Congressional record, Terror Knowledge Base, Jamestown Foundation and other sources which are somewhere on my sidebar as well as direct link in my articles:

5) Iranian influence: Bosnia – This has one of the prime citations by Interpol TO Congress in 2000 on the nature of transnational terrorism, its wide influence, its melding with organized crime on an international basis and a guy by the name of Usama bin Laden in Albania working with Algerian GIA, the KLA and other groups. Also note the wide stretch all the way to FARC and Hezbollah cooperation in South America ( http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2007/02/iranian-influence-bosnia.html )

9) Rep. Hoyer seeks moderates amongst terrorists with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The extreme reach of MB is into the US and has been for over 15 years and the Congressional record is used to establish that. Consider MB to be ‘terror start-up central’ or the equivalent of a venture capitalist organization for terrorism. ( http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2007/04/rep-hoyer-seeking-moderates-amongst.html )

I have huge problems with having Hezbollah, Hamas and al Qaeda setting up shop in Central and particularly South America, especially in the Tri-Border region. Their interconnections with FARC, emerald gangs and local drug kingpins gives these terrorist organizations means to subsist without direct help from regular Nations (especially true of Hezbollah which appears to be self-funding up until Chavez gave them the green light). With the identified groups and individuals who were part of human smuggling rings from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq *still* in place, plus the changing face of radical islam to that of more ethnically hispanic basis in Latin America, I have huge problems with letting in millions of undocumented illegal aliens on *any* basis just on National Security grounds.

This is probably not what you are looking for, but the background documents available to understand how transnational terrorism works and interconnects are easily available at no cost. They are in the public record. And we ignore them at our peril as a society.

Sincerely,

A Jacksonian

— All ideas, thoughts and proposed actions are to be attributed to ‘A Jacksonian’ or ‘A Citizen of the Republic’. Use of personal contact details is expressly prohibited by various Federal and States laws and Treaties with Foreign Nations. To use my personal contact information requires express written consent. My ideas are free to steal and basic attribution is to be given, beyond that place credit or blame as you see fit. Taking good ideas and building upon them is how a Republic is made… no one said it was easy.